This study explores the language variation in university student public speech across two academic disciplines: business administration and education. A corpus of university student public speech, made up of 102 classroom presentations (approximately 215,000 words), was designed, constructed and analysed using both quantitative and qualitative…

This paper attempts to introduce and explain the famous Three Concentric Circles proposed by Kachru, namely, the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle. Based on Kachru's theory, the paper proceeds to discuss four fallacies in EFL and ESL contexts, which are (1) English learners in the Outer and Expanding Circles learn English…

This study focuses on the analysis of variation at the phonological level, specifically the variable realization of palatalization of dental stops before the high vowel /i/ and vowel nasalization in the speech of bilingual speakers of Uruguayan Portuguese (UP) in the city of Rivera, Uruguay. The data were collected in participant-observation and…

Teaching about culture at the college level is always a challenge with regards to the heterogeneous reality of Spanish. The debatable status of the language within the United States is not always reflected in the language and literature departments of institutions of higher education. Moreover, standardization has been continuously favored in the…

Lexical variation abounds in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) and is commonly associated with the introduction of the Australasian Signed English lexicon into Deaf education in 1979, before NZSL was acknowledged as a language. Evidence from dictionaries of NZSL collated between 1986 and 1997 reveal many coexisting variants for the numbers from one…

The language settings used on personal computers interact with the spell-checker in Microsoft Word, which directly affects the flagging of spellings that are deemed incorrect. This study examined the language settings of personal computers owned by a group of Canadian university students. Of 21 computers examined, only eight had their Windows…

This study investigated second language (L2) learners' acquisition of English /t, d/ deletion patterns in word-final consonant clusters, (a) focusing on how constraints such as grammatical conditioning and phonological environment affect deletion of /t, d/ in L2 acquisition and (b) determining the extent to which these L2 learners had acquired…

This thesis has two broad goals. The first is to contribute to the study of Arabic phonology particularly syllable structure and syllabification. This will be achieved through examining phenomena related to syllable structure and syllabic weight such as syllabification, stress assignment, epenthesis, syncope, and sonority in three different…

Vietnamese (Vietic, Mon-Khmer, Austroasiatic) is monosyllabic and tonal. Most Mon-Khmer (MK) languages are multisyllabic and atonal. Evidence suggests that Vietnamese (VN) has had its tones less than one millennium, and that other languages (both MK and non-MK) are also acquiring tones, a process called "tonogenesis". Comparing VN's…

The interrogative intonation of Cubans and Cuban Americans living in Miami is investigated. Two different intonation patterns are used in this variety of Spanish to convey absolute interrogative meaning: one with a falling final contour, as has been observed in Cuban Spanish, and one with a rising final contour, as is used in American English and…

Subjective and objective language data collected in a research project on language variation in north Germany not only reveal information on current linguistic trends in north Germany; they also show how language change in this region is represented in the consciousness of the speakers themselves and described in comments by them. This diachronic…

Given the rapid growth in international contacts worldwide, English is increasingly becoming the chosen medium to facilitate communication among people of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. However, the question remains as to how non-native speakers of English of varying levels of proficiency, using different varieties of English, are…

Systematic syllable-based variation has been observed in the relative spatial and temporal properties of supralaryngeal gestures in a number of complex segments. Generally, more anterior gestures tend to appear at syllable peripheries while less anterior gestures occur closer to syllable peaks. Because previous studies compared only two gestures,…

Purpose: This paper aims to progress the dialogue on language rights in the urban classroom. Research has evidenced how language can serve as a powerful tool in mainstream ideologies; more specifically, the preferred and dominant use of Standard Written English in the American classroom has demonstrated how language serves as a gatekeeper for…

This dissertation examines linguistic spatial frame of reference (FoR) usage across three cohorts, detailing the lexical and structural realization of particular spatial FoR classes within each linguistic community, as well as which linguistic and nonlinguistic factors are predictors of spatial FoR class usage. This study was designed to determine…